The Joan March of Palma claims the art of Saul Steinberg, "the writer who draws"
A retrospective of the famous 'New Yorker' cartoonist covers his work with drawings, paintings, collages and photographs until January 23
PalmaSaul Steinberg made drawing a way of observing and questioning the world. Known above all for his covers and illustrations for The New Yorker, the artist built a body of work that crosses painting, collage, photography, and literature without fully settling into any one discipline. The Joan March Foundation in Palma now proposes a tour through the exhibition Saul Steinberg, Artist, which opened this Tuesday and will be on view until January 23, 2027.
The exhibition is a reduced version of the first complete retrospective dedicated to Steinberg in Spain, presented at the foundation's Madrid headquarters in 2024. The selection allows for an approach to a creator who circulated as much through the pages of magazines as through contemporary art museums.
Drawings, murals, collages, paintings, prints, photographs, artist's books, and magazines account for this diversity. The common thread is drawing, which Steinberg turned into a language capable of combining humor with reflection on social conventions and ways of representing reality. The critic Harold Rosenberg defined him as a "writer of images".
From exile to the pages of 'The New Yorker'
Born in Romania in 1914, Steinberg trained as an architect in Milan. The antisemitic laws of Italian fascism forced him to seek an exit from Europe. After spending time in the Dominican Republic, he managed to settle in the United States in 1942. His collaboration with The New Yorker had begun before his arrival and continued for nearly six decades.
The magazine was decisive for the dissemination of his work. The covers and interior drawings introduced his gaze into North American homes, but his production also made its way into exhibition spaces. In 1946, his work was shown at the MoMA in New York alongside that of artists such as Isamu Noguchi and Robert Motherwell.
"I do not belong entirely to the art world, nor to that of cartoons, nor to that of magazines, which is why the art world does not quite know where to place me," wrote Steinberg. This difficulty in classifying him is one of the keys to the retrospective: visual wit moves from paper to painting, photomontage, and three-dimensional pieces.
His work also maintains links with literature and the theatre of the absurd. An admirer of Nikolai Gogol, Steinberg shared concerns with creators such as Samuel Beckett, Alberto Giacometti, and Eugène Ionesco. Rosenberg went so far as to compare his games between words and images with those of James Joyce.
A donation of more than one hundred pieces
The exhibition has had the participation of the Saul Steinberg Foundation of New York, dedicated to preserving and studying the artist's legacy. This institution has donated more than one hundred pieces to the Joan March Foundation, which thus joins other centers receiving his work, such as the Art Institute of Chicago and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalog with historical texts and essays. Among these is the one that Rosenberg published on the occasion of Steinberg's solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of New York in 1978, and contributions by Sheila Schwartz, María Teresa Muñoz, and Alicia Chillida.